Helping hand: How an amateur inventor helped Nasa design gloves for astronauts

There are already competitions to win everything on Earth. From Make Me a Supermodel to The Apprentice and Grease Is the Word, the shows spur on young hopefuls, leaving behind more traditional methods of signing the face of a new advertising campaign, recruiting a young executive or finding the next star of the stage. Now there are some new reality contests – and they are, quite literally, out of this world.

The Centennial Challenges are Nasa's answer to Fame Academy, but this time the stars for which the public are reaching have nothing to do with celebrity. From this summer, the space agency is offering prizes as high as $5m (£2.44m) to anyone who can solve a new series of problems that Nasa's space engineers cannot. From building space robots to extracting vast quantities of oxygen from lunar rock, the dominant force in galactic exploration has decided it needs fresh ideas to enter the next era of space travel.

The idea developed from Nasa's relationship with Volanz Aerospace, a non-profit organisation in Maryland which now runs the competitions. On 4 August, the first of this summer's competitions, the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge, will be launched with a prize of $250,000 (£122,000). The aim is to tap the largely ignored – but knowledgeable – community of space junkies and garden-shed inventors worldwide, rewarding innovation and fresh design. Arguably unlike the reality television game shows, this is one contest that is mutually beneficial. With the US government and several privately owned space agencies backing them, Nasa's pockets are deep.

Since the contests replace traditional research grants, Nasa is prepared to reward successful participants with large sums of money – and the inventors retain commercial rights to more money further down the line. "Our hope is that the products from some of our competitions also provide the building blocks for various private and commercial space activities, in addition to serving Nasa's activities with new technical breakthroughs," says Brant Sponberg, the challenge programme manager and one of the judges.

Sponberg may be the Simon Cowell of Centennial Challenges, but he lacks the smarmy, know-it-all streak of his Pop Idol counterpart. But then he has little reason to be smug. The Centennial Challenges project was launched in 2005, but until May 2007, none of the challenges had ever been won. In 2005, there was the low-cost space suit challenge, which came with a prize of $500,000; a challenge to build an all-terrain lunar buggy, which was worth a cool $1m; and even a $2m competition to see if anyone could come up with a way of safely delivering six hens' eggs, intact, from a low orbit down to Earth, presumably without a bang. Hundreds of entries were received, but none cut the mustard.

Then, two months ago, just as Mr Sponberg was beginning to despair, along came Peter Homer, an unemployed engineer, with his 14-year-old son, Matthew. On Nasa's website they read about a challenge in which participants were invited to design a glove for astronauts. Gloves are the hardest part of a space suit to design. Like the rest of the suit, they're pressurised, but that means that each finger of the glove wants to stay straight, inflated like a balloon.

The gloves currently in use, the Nasa Phase VI, are sturdy and designed to withstand the rigours of work in a place with no atmosphere. Astronauts face tasks on space walks that demand manual dexterity, and the incredibly stiff pressurised gloves do not help – they often return from their time in orbit with bleeding, sore hands, blistered and broken fingernails after wearing them.

The gloves have two separate inner layers – one formed from a rubbery, balloon-like plastic and another made from soft cloth to keep shape. The outer layer is made from a type of cloth not unlike that used in gardening gloves, only hundreds of times thicker. This helps guard against space debris and insulates the hands against extremes of hot and cold. The current suits are made by a firm called Hamilton Sundstrand.

As Chuck Seaback, the firm's programme manager, has said before: "The primary challenge in a glove design is to maximise hand mobility, while still providing the required protection. Hand fatigue during long, labour-intensive space walks is one of the most difficult challenges to overcome."

The Homers chatted about the problem over supper, at their home in Maine. How does one create a glove that is both strong, yet flexible? Out came the sewing machine, and for months, the father-son team experimented with different fabrics and metals until they came up with a prototype.

Mr Homer experimented by wrapping his hand in masking tape. Each time he would make a fist and see how much he had to fight against the tape. "I sat up one night around midnight wrapping [masking] tape around my fingers and had the 'A-ha!' moment... I figured out that when you put tape around your fingers you can't move your hand." Then he spiralled the tape around each finger, making "x" shapes across the tops of the knuckles. He made a fist – and the tape didn't break or pull at all. "I couldn't even feel the tape. It was like it wasn't even there."

The Homers' chemist provided latex medical gloves for the innermost layer. For the outer shield, Peter Homer used a reinforced cloth-like material his son noticed on eBay. Then Mr Homer, who once had a job sewing sails for yachts, replicated the tape's "x" shape by using x-shaped stitches over each knuckle, and the finished glove was hand-stitched at their dining-room table. It beat entries from two other finalists hands down to scoop the $200,000 (£98,000) jackpot. The winning glove design was required to outdo Nasa's standard astronaut glove and those of the other finalists.

The gloves were tested by measuring how much effort it took to move the fingers, alongside a series of dexterity and strength tasks. "I wanted to do this to show my kids that they can do anything they set their minds to. When I started, I didn't know anything about making a glove. I had to learn that, and also design and make my own test equipment, metal parts and do my own fabrication. It was a great learning experience along the way," he says.

The Centennial Challenges may be out of this world, but also arguably more realistic than anything seen on television. "You can do anything you set your mind to" may be a mantra more commonly heard on Fame Academy than at Nasa research labs, but how many pop wannabes actually go on to success after performing on reality television? How long do Alan Sugar's apprentices actually last in the jobs? The technology behind the Homers' glove, on the other hand, will directly benefit space technology.

It could one day even be sent to the moon for tests. But before that is possible, Nasa has its hands full adapting the design for space. Its scientists hope to replicate the flexible shape and design of the glove using reinforced, more space-worthy materials. After all, the fact that it was hand-sewn on a dining-room table with cloth bought from an internet auction site hardly prepares it to withstand extremes of temperature and the threat of micrometeor impacts.

"Most of the score was on the dexterity of the glove. Like other Centennial Challenges, the astronaut glove challenge encouraged innovation that will greatly enhance Nasa's capabilities," says Alan Hayes, chief executive officer of Volanz Aerospace.

"New technologies and innovations will now be developed to improve the wearability and dexterity of gloves," he says. Buoyed by the Astronaut Glove Challenge, Mr Hayes looked to the next contest, the Regolith Excavation Challenge, held on 14 and 15 May. Four teams competed with home-made low-energy lunar diggers to excavate as much mock moon soil as possible in 30 minutes. No one, Mr Hayes says, walked away with the $125,000 prize. That just might be a good thing. In a world of reality game shows, it is refreshing to come across a sponsor who is only willing to reward talent, intelligence and hard work. With five further challenges planned for 2007, serious contenders can, for once, shun shooting stars and use their brains to aim high.

Nasa has just announced plans to run the contests until 2010. You can even, via the space agency's website, submit ideas for your own challenge. There you have it. Celebrity is not the only way to rub shoulders with the stars.

The challenges ahead

Personal Air Vehicle Challenge

Date: August 2007

Prize money: $250,000

This is a contest to build light aircraft for use on Earth to ferry passengers to and from waiting spacecraft.

MoonRox Challenge

Date: June 2008

Prize money: $250,000

Entrants must extract 2.5kg of oxygen from 100kg of mock lunar rock – in four hours or less.

Beam Power Challenge

Date: October 2007

Prize money: $500,000

Teams design and build a lift that runs up and down a tethered ribbon.

Lunar Lander Challenge

Date: October 2007

Prize money: $2 million

Competitors build a rocket that takes off vertically, ascends, reaches cruise height and then lands vertically.

Tether Challenge

Date: October 2007

Prize money: $500,000

Candidates must up with the strongest rope yet for use in structural applications in space.